In 1877, John Gully retired from his role as chief draughtsman in the Nelson Survey Office and took a month-long sketching tour of Wanaka, Milford Sound, Wakatipu and Manapouri. A year later, when he exhibited his new watercolours, he was commended by the Nelson Evening Mail for “two large watercolour paintings, the latest, and, to our mind, the best of the many that have been produced from the studio of that now celebrated artist... These represented Milford Sound and Lake Wakatipu… two nobler pictures it would be difficult to find.”

(Our Collection: 19th and 20th Century New Zealand Art, 2018)

Elizabeth Kelly (née Abbott) made this sculptural portrait bust while at the Canterbury College School of Art, where she studied from 1891–1901. She won regular prizes for her modelling from life, including at the 1906–07 Christchurch International Exhibition. Kelly later became one of New Zealand’s leading society portrait painters, in the 1930s showing her work in exhibitions in London, Edinburgh and Paris.

Laura was modelled on the artist’s younger sister, Laura Maude Cox (née Abbott, 1884–1957). One of the earliest sculptures in the collection by a New Zealand born artist, it is a recent gift to the city from Margaret Abbott, a great-niece of the two sisters.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

The Rotterdam-born Petrus van der Velden arrived in New Zealand in 1890. Following his first visit to Otira Gorge in January 1891, he became engrossed with this subject, and painted its powerful, surging torrents many times over the next two years.

This painting was purchased by Gilbert Anderson, a leader in New Zealand’s frozen meat industry, also involved with the Canterbury Society of Arts. Anderson sold it to the Society in 1912; it was purchased from them in 1996 through the Community Trust and Christchurch Art Gallery Trust.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

As well as being enjoyed for their superb decorative qualities, Dutch still life paintings were intended to be reminders of the beauty, brevity and fragility of life. An arrangement of tulips, anemone, nicotiana, jonquils, morning glory and oriental poppies, this work is attributed to the Antwerp-born Flemish painter Pieter Hardimé, who lived at The Hague from 1697.

The painting arrived from Windsor, England as an unexpected and welcome gift, shortly after the 2011 earthquakes. It was given in memory of Kathleen Muriel Whiteley (1904–1949), who had historical family ties to Christchurch, from the estate of her husband Albert, whom she married two years before her death in 1949.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

Ina te Papatahi lived at the Waipapa Māori hostel in Mechanics Bay, Tāmakimakaurau / Auckland, not far from Charles Goldie’s Hobson Street studio. She sat for him many times, the first time in 1902. The niece of prominent Ngāpuhi rangatira (chiefs) Eruera Maihi Patuone and Tāmati Waka Nene, both signatories of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, she was well-connected and introduced Goldie to many other Māori who agreed to sit for him. Ina te Papatahi was later remembered by Goldie’s friend, the writer and historian James Cowan, for her “very likeable nature”, “keen sense of humour” and the “great interest [she took] in the painting of her portrait”.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

This work was painted during a sketching trip to Bridgnorth, Shropshire in the summer of 1932. Its lively watercolour style and subject matter express Hodgkins’s characteristic interest in capturing the fleeting sensations of a moment.

Following her death in England, Pleasure Garden was one of six works by Hodgkins brought to Christchurch in 1948 at the request of the Canterbury Society of Arts. When the Society’s purchasing committee rejected the selection, a group of independent art supporters raised the purchase price and offered it to the city’s gallery, whose refusal generated metres of newspaper column displeasure and debate. In 1951 their persistence finally paid off.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

Treading a path well established in the 1850s by the Pre-Raphaelites, George Sheridan Knowles’s Glasgerion takes its direction from the tragic medieval romance in a lyric narrative of the same name. It was one of 305 English and Scottish popular ballads collected by Francis James Child and published between 1882 and 1898. Sheridan Knowles was among many late Victorian illustrators and painters inspired by the ballads. His large-scale depiction of the eager, soon-to-be betrayed lovers was widely admired when hung on the walls of the Royal Academy in 1897.

Glasgerion was one of six paintings brought to Christchurch from London in 1903 by the Canterbury Society of Arts, which set about raising funds to buy them. This was the first painting purchased, through a gift by local politician and businessman, John Thomas Peacock.

(The Moon and the Manor House, 12 November 2021 – 1 May 2022)

In response to the adverse impacts and uncertainties of the industrial age, many late Victorian and Edwardian British artists were drawn to somewhat escapist historical or literary themes. Lavishly displaying this tendency, George Dunlop Leslie’s In the Wizard’s Garden was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1904, and in New Zealand at the 1906–07 Christchurch International Exhibition. Because the painting puzzled visitors, Leslie was asked for an explanation of its meaning. Its unhappy subject was a young medieval noblewoman who had sought an alchemist or wizard’s guidance to discover the secrets of the future. The theme originated from American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappacini’s Daughter’, a macabre tale featuring a garden filled with poisonous plants. The setting of the painting was, however, English rather than Italian: it is known to be based on Leslie’s own garden in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. London-based, former Dunedin merchant Wolf Harris, a friend of many leading artists, bought the work almost as soon as it arrived in Christchurch and then gifted it to the Canterbury Society of Arts.

(The Moon and the Manor House, 12 November 2021 – 1 May 2022)

In 1911, two years after arriving in London, Raymond McIntyre began his long association with the Goupil Gallery, the city’s leading international contemporary art dealer, and exhibited for the first time with the prestigious New English Art Club. McIntyre built his reputation on small, pared-back landscapes and stylised heads depicting young women. The influence of Japanese woodblock prints is evident, as is the work of William Nicholson, from whom he briefly took lessons. McIntyre became an established figure in London art circles, thanks also to his role as art critic for the Architectural Review.

(The Moon and the Manor House, 12 November 2021 – 1 May 2022)

Gaspar van Wittel is also known by the italianised version of his name, Vanvitelli

Dutch-born Gaspar van Wittel reached Rome aged about twenty-two in 1674, becoming part of a high-spirited, long-established group of expatriate Dutch painters known as the Bentvueghels (Dutch for ‘birds of a feather’). He married Anna Lorenzani of Rome (their eldest son was the leading eighteenth-century Italian architect Luigi Vanvitelli) and spent the rest of his life in Italy. Van Wittel played a pivotal role in the development of the genre of topographical painting known as veduta, and was an important influence on later artists such as Canaletto (1697–1768). Van Wittel’s paintings typically became treasured souvenirs for those on the high culture rite of passage known as the Grand Tour. Three other versions of this view are known, at different sizes and with different arrangements of figures, livestock and lighting. These are based on a gridded pencil, ink and watercolour sketch dated 1685 and held at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma.

(The Weight of Sunlight, 16 September 2017 - 16 September 2018)

The French artist Henriette Browne excelled at painting highly realist, representational narrative paintings and La Lecture de la Bible is one of her finest. Browne produced several portraits of religious devotees and the two young women in this painting are thought to be novices studying to enter a religious order. They are clearly virtuous – their austere black garments suggest a puritan character and the painting is also known as The Puritans. The withered flowers on the table are the most obvious narrative element in the painting, these are a vanitas symbol for the passing of time and the loss of youth. La Lecture de la Bible was first owned by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoléon III, and was presented to the Gallery by its major benefactor, Robert McDougall.

(New Dawn Fades, November 2018)

First exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1857 with the title 'Les Puritaines', this painting has for many years also been known as 'La Lecture de la Bible'.

“Ki te kotahi te kākaho ka whati, ki te kāpuia, e kore e whati.” —King Tāwhiao [If there is but one toetoe stem it will break, but if they are together in a bundle they will never break.] While in Sydney in 1884, en route to England, King Tāwhiao had his photograph taken by Henry King. Vienna-trained, Bohemia-born painter Gottfried Lindauer obtained a copy in Aotearoa New Zealand and that became the source for this portrait.Tāwhiao’s kaupapa (intention) was to meet Queen Victoria, gain recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi, and redress the injustice of vast confiscations of Māori land – he was blocked, however, from seeing her.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Harry Linley Richardson began painting Cynthia’s Birthday in Karori, Wellington in December 1926. When purchased for Christchurch’s intended new art gallery in 1928, it attracted much criticism, largely for the children’s doll-like immobility. “Where is the joyful spirit of a birthday party? Why, such dolefulness?” wrote “Disgusted Ratepayer” to the Press, also discerning “no concentration on the matter at hand, namely, the lighting of the candle.”While others defended the selection, the painter himself had no comeback. London-born Richardson had arrived in New Zealand to teach at Wellington Technical College in 1908, and was a painter with a background in illustration and design, influences both evident in this work. Looking back rather than forward, he also admired the work of mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painters such as John Everett Millais, whose devotion to realism with decorative effect and melancholic tone Cynthia’s Birthday certainly suggests.The work’s solemnity also makes it difficult perhaps not to consider the demands made on sitters, even the most pliable – these were the artist’s children – and the inherent tensions of artist-model relationships.

(Persistent encounters, March 2020)

Gertrude Demain Hammond was a prolific book illustrator whose formal art training began in 1879 at the Lambeth School of Art, alongside her sister Christiana, and continued at the Royal Academy Schools from 1885. She first exhibited in the academy’s prestigious annual summer show in 1886. In 1891 she sold a painting from the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours to the Empress Frederick of Germany – Queen Victoria’s eldest child, Princess Victoria – and in 1896 was elected to the institute. Gertrude and Christiana were recognised in the 1890s as Britain’s leading women illustrators. After Gertrude’s marriage in 1898, the sisters lived and worked from the same address at St Paul’s Studios, Hammersmith – a grand suite of Arts and Crafts studio apartments established as an urban artists’ colony.

A Reading from Plato was shown at the Royal Academy in 1903 before being sent to Christchurch for the 1906–07 New Zealand International Exhibition, where it was purchased by local art collector James Jamieson who, with his brother William, ran one of the country’s largest construction companies.

(The Moon and the Manor House, 12 November 2021 – 1 May 2022)

Thomas Benjamin Kennington’s focus as an artist was in the sympathetic depiction of the everyday reality of the poor and working classes. Born in Grimsby, a seaport on England's east coast, he studied art in Liverpool, London and Paris, and from 1880 exhibited annually at the Royal Academy, where this naturalistic workroom scene was shown in 1908.

Relaxation was exhibited at the 1911 International Exposition of Art in Rome and at the 1913 New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts exhibiton in Wellington. By 1920 it was in the hands of newspaper proprietor Robert Bell. Bell was president of the Canterbury Society of Arts from 1925–26, and bequeathed ten paintings to the gallery. (Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

Frederic Leighton was probably the single most influential figure in the English-speaking art world of the late nineteenth century: he was made president of the Royal Academy and knighted by Queen Victoria in 1878, and later made a baron. He was also held in high regard in Australasian art circles. When, in 1887, he agreed to purchase, on behalf of the Canterbury Society of Arts, £250 worth of Royal Academy paintings – “a few works of an educational character” – it was regarded as a local triumph. Leighton’s captivating painting of a young Roman woman, Teresina, was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1876, and came to New Zealand for the Christchurch International Exhibition thirty years later. Its purchase by Canterbury Society of Arts was regarded as another notable coup.

(The Moon and the Manor House, 12 November 2021 – 1 May 2022)

Ana Reupene Whetuki from the Ngāti Maru iwi (tribe) was well-known in the Thames goldfield district in the Coromandel. Also known as Heeni Hirini and Heeni Phillips, she married the Ngāti Maru rangatira (chief) Reupene Whetuki and lived at Manaia, where some of her descendants still live today.Gottfried Lindauer based this portrait on a striking 1870s photographic studio portrait by the Foy Brothers of Thames. Lindauer first visited Thames in 1874, shortly after arriving in Aotearoa New Zealand from Bohemia (present day Czech Republic). He painted at least twelve versions of this portrait between 1878 and 1920.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Nathaniel Webb, the subject of this striking 300-year-old portrait, was a Bristol merchant who – like many of his peers in this period – is known to have made a vast fortune through West Indies sugar and slavery.

Webb’s portrait was donated in 2007 by a direct descendant, in honour of her father John Jekyll Cuddon, a respected Christchurch chartered accountant. The painting came to New Zealand with Henry Joseph C. Jekyll, who immigrated to Canterbury in 1862, and in 1880 purchased a large parcel of farmland beyond the edges of Christchurch, naming it Dallington after an old family estate.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

Matthijs Naiveu studied under the leading seventeenth century Dutch painter Gerrit Dou (painter of The Physician). Naiveu’s tavern scene presents a moral lesson: the child implores his mother and a man who may be his father to put their intoxication aside, and give him a better chance in life.

This is one of many works presented to the Gallery by the Canterbury Society of Arts in 1932. It was bequeathed to the society by Scottish-born Major Archibald C. D. Spencer (1861–1929). Major Spencer retired from service with the Royal Irish Rifles in South Africa, Canada and Malta and settled at Mount Peel in South Canterbury.

This painting’s central figure is a piskijker, a Dutch word for a doctor who specialises in the study of urine. In this case, he is thought to be conducting a pregnancy test, carefully watched over by the woman behind him. He is surrounded by symbols of his skill and knowledge, including a textbook of human anatomy. Other elements in Gerrit Dou’s carefully constructed painting draw our attention to this invisible potential life: the illustration of a skeleton on the open page was a familiar vanitas symbol reminding viewers of the brevity of mortal life, while the sculpted ledge under the window shows a scene of sinful pleasure – perhaps a clue to the circumstances of conception.

(Absence, May 2023)

Although apparently portraying a refined Venetian lady – a young woman with carnival mask, black veil and shawl – this work was painted not in Italy, but England. Yorkshire-born William Frith, who became extremely well-known for his large, densely populated panoramas of contemporary English life, also painted small costume studies early in his career, often modelled on literary figures. Frith’s model in this work, painted in 1846, strongly resembles his wife Isabelle (née Baker), whom he married in York in June 1845; Isabelle sat for him several times. Isabelle Frith became a close friend and confidante of Catherine Dickens, wife of author Charles, who (although a friend of her husband’s) she later banned from entering their London home; this following the 1858 breakup of the Dickens’ marriage. The Frith marriage was also ‘troubled’: Isabelle had 12 children to William from 1846–60; his mistress Mary Alford had six more to him from 1855. (He married Mary in 1881, a year after the death of Isabelle.)

(The Weight of Sunlight, 16 September 2017 - 16 September 2018)

In about 1901, having established a strong reputation with his painting in Scotland, the Glasgow-based George Henry relocated to London, where he began to establish a successful society portrait practice.

The Black Hat – possibly the work exhibited to acclaim as ‘La dame au chapeau noir’ at the Royal Glasgow Institute in 1904 – was one of twelve paintings selected in 1911 by the English artist Niels Lund to be purchased for the Canterbury Society of Arts. Its acquisition in 1912 was enabled through a newly agreed £50 annual subsidy from the Christchurch City Council; the society presented the painting to the city's new public gallery in 1932.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

At around the age of seventeen, the orphaned Meindert Hobbema met Jacob van Ruisdael, an artist considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, who would teach him how to become an artist. Painted around ten years later, A Wooded Landscape with Peasants on a Path and an Angler at a Stream shows Hobbema proceeding on his own merit and demonstrating his own style. The lowered horizon line creates a big sky, which is animated by rolling clouds in silvery blues, greys and bright whites. Their forms are continued in the treetops and knotted branches that frame and obscure the scene, which recedes almost endlessly into the distance, to reveal fields flooded by sunlight and the understated silhouette of a church.

(Endless Light, 29 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)

The Dunedin-born Frances Hodgkins was running her own watercolour painting school in Paris when World War I broke out in 1914. She relocated to St. Ives in Cornwall, where she found many displaced Belgian families also living, and painted this work in response to their wretched plight. Unshatterable, one of her first oil paintings, was exhibited in London in 1916 and purchased by the painter Sir Cedric Morris. Dr Rodney Wilson, the Gallery’s director in 1980, visited Morris, and with assistance from the National Art Collections Fund, a British art charity, successfully secured this work for the Christchurch collection.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

Born in 1695 in Naples or Venice, Jacopo Amigoni worked in Munich from 1719 as a painter at the court of Maximilian II Emanuel, before moving to London to paint for King George II in 1729. A pioneer of the Venetian Rococo style, Amigoni painted this sumptuous mythological scene during his stay in London. It pictures Bacchus, Roman god of wine, leaning in a drunken stupor against Ariadne, the Cretan princess who became his immortal bride, who is warning the putti not to waken him. Amigoni returned to Venice in 1739 after making what was considered a fortune through his painting in London, and spent his later years from 1747 in the court of King Ferdinand VI in Madrid. Patronage for artists such as Amigoni linked to the taste for Italian decorative art and high culture that was prevalent among Europe’s elite.

(Persistent Encounters, March 2020)

The 55-year-old Alexander Walker (1764–1831) and his wife Barbara (née Montgomery, 1770–1831) commissioned Scotland’s leading portraitist, Henry Raeburn, to paint their portraits in 1819. They had married eight years earlier; shortly after Alexander’s retirement from over thirty years’ service with the East India Company – mostly in India – and had two young sons. Alexander had one final Company role before him, that of Governor of St. Helena from 1823–28.

Two of their grandsons, William Campbell Walker and Alexander John Walker, immigrated to New Zealand in 1862 to farm in Canterbury; William later became Minister of Education. These impressive ancestral portraits were presented by descendants in 1984.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

Previously attributed to the Rome-based sculptor Alfredo Biagini, Dante’s Beatrice is now recognised as the work of a lesser-known but nevertheless highly accomplished artist U. Biagini working in Florence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Representing Beatrice, who captured the heart of the thirteenth-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, it is a fine example of the Florentine sculptor’s idealised marble busts.

Dante’s Beatrice was given to the city through the bequest of the retired Christchurch merchant and importer John Alexander Redpath (1875–1975).

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

Psyche, in Greek mythology, was a mortal princess whose beauty attracted the attention of Eros, the god of love, and the jealous anger of his mother Aphrodite. The renowned Parisian sculptor Auguste Rodin worked on variations on the theme of Psyche between 1886 and 1905. This bronze is a later casting, produced by the Musée Rodin at a foundry in Paris in 1961.

Psyche was purchased by the New Zealand Government in 1962 through a fund established to strengthen learning and cultural relations between New Zealand and France. After being exhibited in Christchurch in 1963, this city became the sculpture’s permanent home.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

The Flemish artist Jan Frans van Son came from an artistic family; his father, Joris van Son, was also a respected painter. During the sixteenth century the demand for artists to paint flower subjects – particularly rare and exotic blooms – mirrored the increased enthusiasm for the cultivation of flowers in Holland. By the seventeenth century, still-life flower painting had become a major genre in Dutch painting, and it was at this that van Son excelled. He relocated to England as a young man around 1675 where he established himself as a highly successful painter renowned for his flower paintings.

(New Dawn Fades, November 2018)

Between 1618 and 1648, Europe was thrown into turmoil by the Thirty Years’ War – a bitter conflict that raged between Catholic and Protestant states. It was renowned for the vicious fighting often brought about by the large mercenary armies employed on both sides. Here, Droochsloot depicts the confiscations and pillaging by mercenary soldiers as they drive Dutch villagers from their homes.

(New Dawn Fades, November 2018)

Modelled by Alfred Drury after a friend’s daughter in fancy dress, this wistful bronze bust is one of many variations of The Age of Innocence he made between 1897 and 1918; some in white marble. It is regarded as an important work in the British New Sculpture movement, whose followers sought either greater naturalism or symbolic qualities than had been found in the prevailing neoclassical approach.

Brought from England to Christchurch for the 1906–07 New Zealand International Exhibition, it was purchased by the Canterbury Society of Arts, and presented to the city in 1932 to become part of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery’s founding collection.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

In 1911, two years after arriving in London, Raymond McIntyre began his long association with the Goupil Gallery, the city’s leading international contemporary art dealer, and exhibited for the first time with the prestigious New English Art Club. McIntyre built his reputation on small, pared-back landscapes and stylised heads depicting young women. The influence of Japanese woodblock prints is evident, as is the work of William Nicholson, from whom he briefly took lessons. McIntyre became an established figure in London art circles, thanks also to his role as art critic for the Architectural Review.

(The Moon and the Manor House, 12 November 2021 – 1 May 2022)

The 55-year-old Alexander Walker (1764–1831) and his wife Barbara (née Montgomery, 1770–1831) commissioned Scotland’s leading portraitist, Henry Raeburn, to paint their portraits in 1819. They had married eight years earlier; shortly after Alexander’s retirement from over thirty years’ service with the East India Company – mostly in India – and had two young sons. Alexander had one final Company role before him, that of Governor of St. Helena from 1823–28.

Two of their grandsons, William Campbell Walker and Alexander John Walker, immigrated to New Zealand in 1862 to farm in Canterbury; William later became Minister of Education. These impressive ancestral portraits were presented by descendants in 1984.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

Henri Fantin-Latour’s Panier de Raisins evokes the abundance of midsummer and an atmosphere of unhurried pleasure and respite. Every June from 1878 onwards, once the clamour of the Paris Salon had subsided, Fantin-Latour and his wife Victoria (née Dubourg) closed their city apartment and headed to rural France, and a small country house in Lower Normandy, to paint until summer’s end. Henri Fantin-Latour sent the best of his new still-life paintings to his dealer in London, where they found a ready audience.Fantin-Latour produced over 800 fruit and flower paintings between 1862 and 1896, nearly all of which sold in England – the paintings for which he is most highly regarded were unknown to his countrymen. As the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche protested in 1919, “For too long, they were not found in France; Fantin was revealed to us only through rare portraits and fantasies.”

(Persistent encounters, March 2020)

Gerrit Berckheyde’s contribution to the Dutch Golden Age of painting was as an exponent of the cityscape, which became a new genre from the mid seventeenth-century. Berckheyde was Haarlem-based, and began producing paintings of Cologne in about 1670, from sketches made in the 1650s. He painted a series of works depicting St. Gereon’s Basilica, a large and distinctive Romanesque style church completed in the thirteenth century.

This painting was purchased through a significant bequest made in 1953 from an insurance settlement from the estate of William Ballantyne (1864–1934), whose art collection had been largely destroyed in the 1947 Ballantyne’s department store fire.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)